A less-than-thrilling takeoff on the Kennedy murders.
The new novel by Bond (The Doorstep of Depravity, 2005, etc.) looks at the Kennedy assassinations through the eyes of an unsuspecting witness to conspiracy.
It’s the summer of 1963. Cajun ingénue Bones LeBeau arrives in New Orleans and lands a waitress job at a seedy restaurant where a clique of underworld-type figures known to her only by their first names holds court in the back room. Bones and her co-worker Tina keep busy in back serving food and playing strip dice-rolling games for the entertainment of the regulars and their guests, including a gentlemanly singer they call Mr. Frank. But she occasionally overhears their unsettling table talk about Cuba, “The Company,” “Norma Jean” and a certain objectionable public servant; her innocent suggestion that they get said official fired sparks a malevolent glimmer in their eyes. Drifting to Dallas, Bones works at a strip club belonging to one Mr. Jack, brings hamburgers to a group of men who discuss rifles in French and picks up on veiled talk of hypnosis; come November 22, she starts to discern a monstrous plan amid these disjointed observations. The author steeps Bones’ story in atmospheric settings and punchy dialogue, and Kennedy assassination mavens will enjoy spotting various figures and plot shards from prominent conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, the heroine’s naïve ramble through history is so perfunctory that no suspense builds while we wait for the opaque conversations and low-key encounters to gel into the tragedy we know is coming. (An explanatory appendix by a fictional KGB operative makes the conspiracy vaster and more confusing, but no more exciting.) Then, in a subplot set in ’68, two random people are clued in by Bones’ taped reminiscences to a looming conspiracy against Bobby Kennedy and face this dilemma: should they race to California to thwart another assassination, or should they just sit around until it unfolds in front of them on TV? Stymied by his characters’ passivity, Bond tries to juice things up with drawn-out striptease scenes, but even these are so good-natured and prim that our pulses stay rock steady.
A less-than-thrilling takeoff on the Kennedy murders.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0967355122
Page Count: 218
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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